Google adds time travel to Street View

Google isn’t just your run of the mill search company anymore. It’s big in smartphones, robotics, and machine learning. It even has its own time machine — sort of. A new feature in Google Maps Street View lets you go back in time and see what a location looked like as early as 2007.

Until now, each time a Street View car puttered down a street and captured updated images, that data replaced the old snapshots used in Maps. With this change, users will be able to go back to earlier versions of Street View to see how things have changed in the last seven years. You’ll be able to see buildings rise up, seasons change, and the devastating effect of natural disasters.

Google links to a few locations that might be particularly cool to see evolve over the years including the Freedom Tower in New York and the World Cup Stadium in Brazil. Construction projects like that are an obvious angle, but the images in Street View aren’t just from different years, but different times of year. You can checkout the landscape of scenic country roads in winter and summer, for example.

As is Google’s habit, this feature is being rolled out slowly to users, so you might not have access to it just yet. You’ll know your time machine is ready when the clock icon appears in the upper left of the Street View image. This will bring up a slider that lets you move through the various incarnations of that section of Google’s imagery. Keep in mind this time machine doesn’t go to all places equally just yet. Some places have a dozen different versions of Street View imagery, and others only a few.